Which one you you bastards is responsible...

J

Joe DeFuria

Legend
...for trying to put through a $13,000 charge on my credit card?!

My credit card company just called me to let me know they declined an attempted charge of $13K to CleanFilms (which I never even heard of before). :oops: They apparently tried to use the wrong expiry date.

Baffling. What the hell could CleanFilms possibly be legitimatley billing for that much?

Now I wonder if someone is actually trying to use my or my wife's identity...or if maybe CleanFilms just completely botched a transaction with someone else?

Obviously, my account is being closed and reopend...so now I've got to go and cancel / modify all kinds of accounts that are direct billed to the card...sigh...
 
Umm, I think Natoma's financial debt has become too great in recent weeks, what with the flood of good games coming out. :devilish:

On the serious side, that just flat-out sucks.
 
If you don't already, I would suggest you get a cross cut paper shredder. Do NOT get a standard single cut paper shredder as it is very simple to reconstitute the documents. We shred every piece of mail that has our name and address on it, as well as any account #s or whatever. Even mail that comes in for credit card offers. You'd be surprised how easy it is to steal your identity these days. I think the last estimate is that 1 out of every 10 people in the US will experience identity theft in the next year, and it's rising fast.

Another way to be safe it is to check your credit reports and score once every quarter. MyFico gives you the reports and scores from the 3 major credit bureaus. I check mine once a quarter to make sure that everything is on the up and up. Or if you're not as anal as I am when it comes to your credit, sign up for their credit alert. If any changes occur on your credit history, an email is fired off to you telling you about it.

Other than that, paper shredding is your friend.

p.s.: I googled CleanFilms and it appears to be some sort of NetFlix type deal. Have you signed up recently for any online DVD rental services?
 
John Reynolds said:
Umm, I think Natoma's financial debt has become too great in recent weeks, what with the flood of good games coming out. :devilish:

On the serious side, that just flat-out sucks.
Click to expand...

Oh no, don't even joke like that. :LOL:

I'm super paranoid about identity theft. If I see any charge on any card that I don't know about, I'm on the phone with Eddie, and if he doesn't know, I'm on the phone with the credit card company or my bank immediately. The last time I did that was for a $2 charge that happened to be part of a service charge for the credit card. I had no clue what it was for, so I spent half an hour tracking it down. :LOL:

Yea, I'm nuts. :)
 
13K doesnt walk on the road just like that. I'm glad they blocked the transfer though I'm clueless what could be the reason behind it -- identity theft is pretty popular right now.

My mother's CC was once charged for stuff she have never orderd -- one day a guy calls and says her package is ready to be shipped and says they charged her account xxx.xx amount. WTF is that? Something similar to "Hello this is Brandy calling from New York Times, your home delivery will start next monday, it's only $1.50 per week. Have a nice day" Some attitude eh.

Though 13K...I don't know :?
 
Actually when my wife recently purchased her bowflex the credit card company blocked the charge just because it looked suspicious and contacted us...I LIKE that about my CC company. :)
 
Now you know why I like to keep my anonymity on these message boards, and also why I don't include my real name/phone or anything about where I live on a "home page". It is pathetically easy to track down all of someone's personal info with just very few pieces of info (real name, area code or city) I got burned in the early 80s by a rival hacker group in the pirate scene. They switched off my phones, charged my parent's credit cards, and turned me into the authorities. Luckily I had trashed all my warez and phreaking stuff when the authorities showed up.
 
Speaking of shreding documents, we just recently burned 5 years worth of documents in a garbage can in our back yard.
 
I got burned in the early 80s by a rival hacker group in the pirate scene. They switched off my phones, charged my parent's credit cards, and turned me into the authorities. Luckily I had trashed all my warez and phreaking stuff when the authorities showed up.
Click to expand...

Sounds like something out of the 1995 movie "Hackers"
 
Paul said:
I got burned in the early 80s by a rival hacker group in the pirate scene. They switched off my phones, charged my parent's credit cards, and turned me into the authorities. Luckily I had trashed all my warez and phreaking stuff when the authorities showed up.
Click to expand...

Sounds like something out of the 1995 movie "Hackers"
Click to expand...

Too bad he couldn't work Angelina Jolie into his story. ;)
 
It's not fiction, it's real. Hackers came out way after people had already been doing this. Let me give you a few examples:

1) hacked credit bureau merchant accounts (dialup, + passwords) were routinely traded on hacker BBSes and voicemail boxes in the 80s. Using this, you could lookup someone via telephone number, name, or SSN and get their entire credit history, and from there, lookup their family's credit history, including all of their revolving accounts.

2) Using credit card information, you could either phone in orders to drop points and have some teenager pick up the stash, or, you could create a new credit card. A friend of mind who was an electrical engineer created a machine used to write new credit card magnetic strips on the back of any card. Another guy used a stolen ZOM machine (merchant machine to verify cards before Verifone came out) which performed a simple read and integrity check on the card. This integrity check is the well known "double mod 10" check-digit routine. The Z80 assembly code in the ZOM machine was disassembled to find out the encoding mechanism on the magnetic strip which is a self-clocking bi-polar code.

3) With this equipment in hand, you can make *physical* credit cards with someone else's info.

4) Possessing all of someone's personal data, you can call up the utility companies and deactive or activate services, since they would just query you about your address, phone, mother's maiden name, etc

5) In the days of blueboxes/purple boxes/rainbox boxes it was possible to get operator privileges, listen in on phone calls, shutdown active phone calls, (e.g. before call waiting, the "operator interruption" request)

6) Social engineering was quite easy in the days before the 90s internet. Few people were aware of hacking. All it took was a little knowledge of the target to breed familiarity, and an air of authority to get what you want.

Back in the 80s, Americans used to scam AT&T calling cards off people by the thousands. I knew a teenage guy whose voice hadn't changed and he sounded like a female operator on the phone. He would call up people, tell them there was something wrong with their bill and ask them for the last 4 digits of their calling card for verification (the first 10 are the phone number itself). These were then promptly traded to Europeans so they they could uploaded cracked 8-bit C64 warez to US bulletin boards in exchange. They would also use American calling cards to make free local calls within Europe.

Simply put: a twelve year old kid could *seriously fuck you up* in the 80s.
 
Sorry to hear that Joe. I used to think my Mum was going a bit far when she said she bleached old documents before disposing of them. Not any more.
 
Happened to me 3 times with unauthorized online purchases bout 4 years ago. Not big amounts like that tho and all were easily corrected with a couple calls. Im not worried about that much anymore since the 3 incidents as cc cies are quick to fix it and Ive also had no probs since.
 
Yeah, this incident is nothing more than a nuisance in practical terms...and I can't help but wonder if this was just a transaction mess-up, that happened to to use my CC number.

I mean, would anyone really try and charge that much in one shot as a serious attempt at theft? Sounds like the surest way to raise a red flag, which is exactly what happened.

In any case, I'm certainly going to check out my latest credit reports (haven't done that in a couple years), to make sure there are no odd accounts open in my (or my wife's) name.
 
DemoCoder said:
It's not fiction, it's real. Hackers came out way after people had already been doing this. Let me give you a few examples:

<snip>
Click to expand...

Ah, happy memories of the 70s suddenly re-surface....now I wanna go to me Mum's and dig my old black box out of the basement. (My bro was the local T.A.P. guy back then, still got the old issues. 8) )

Thanks for the flashback DC. I never got into any hacking of other people as I felt that was wrong, but the days of screwing over "Ma Bell" sure were fun! :D
 
A friend of mine had credit cards registered in her name by some criminals. They ordered thousands of dollars worth of stuff (Dell Laptops, cell phones, etc.) And had them delivered to her house when she was at work. The police were the first to notify her of these activities. They set up a sting operation and caught them at her house. It turns out that it was a part of a larger criminal operation. All this took place over a two month period and she was told that they had charged over $50,000 worth of goods in her name alone. If they were not caught could you imagine what it would have done to her credit rating?
 
It goes to show Clean Films was not charging $4.95 per minute, but actually $495 per minute. Pay close attention to where the period lies next time :)
 
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